


atrophy

by clarinetta



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Horror, Poetry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-23
Packaged: 2017-12-14 09:50:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/835555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clarinetta/pseuds/clarinetta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Decay follows Sam, heavy and sweet and rotting, until he thinks he might be going mad with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. part 1

There is something crawling on his arm.

He scratches, frowning, finding

nothing

pulls down his sleeve and

forgets about it.

\--

A pounding on the bathroom door

shatters the light doze that

the warm water lulled him into

Dean, then, shouting

_they don’t have all day, little brother, come on_

_out and eat some breakfast_

_and let big brother have a turn_.

He shakes

strings of water-dark hair out of his face and

turns off the water.

 

The day is wide open, blank like a Saturday should be.

Sam smiles around his toothbrush,

spits in the sink, and

catches a tendril of scent, the smell

of sweet decay curling

above the drain.

He rears back in disgust, the smell heavy and

warm, stronger still as he steps away

and wonders how

he did not notice it before.

He inspects the drain, but the few grimy inches give him

no answers

and he steps away again

eyes watering

against the smell.

 

_I think something died in our sink_ , he tells Dean,

conversationally;

Dean grunts wordlessly, paying Sam’s words no mind,

and stumps into the steamy bathroom

closing the door behind him.

 

By the time Dean emerges, they have both

forgotten.

 

There are no cases within a hundred miles,

nothing Bobby wants them to take,

and nothing playing on the four channels

the Dean keeps flipping through,

more and more annoyed every time the numbers circle

from 23 back to 4 to 7 to 12 to 23

and he throws the remote away

and throws himself back onto his bed

petulant, still a pouting child

in so many ways

and Sam smiles, reaching back with orangutan arms, sleeves

riding up and sliding above his elbows as he stretches

and tips his head back, eyes closed,

catching the sun through

the grimy motel window.

He opens his eyes

and **_JERKS_**

forward, gasping—

a small cut in his arm, the nick of a demon knife three days before,

small as a cat scratch, wouldn’t even leave a scar—

there are thin lightning-strike fingers of black snaking

from the center, the redblisterangryhot of it

all around

tiny flakes of dead skin

breaking over the shiny raw flesh

 

It had just been a scratch—barely bled, no stitches

nearly healed just this morning

and yet in a flash Sam sees the wound

not healing— _festering_ ,

angry, inflamed, throbbing, discolored,

_wrong_.

 

Sam sits, upright, the jolt of fear still making his heart poundpoundpound

and brings his arm up to his eyes and sees—

nothing.

A scratch, a nick from a demon’s knife, barely there,

The skin around it unbroken and tan and healthy.

_What is your deal_ , Dean grunts from the bed.

Sam is still

gasping

he’d been sure, he’d seen so clearly, felt the throb of infection

burning for a split second, bright and hard

but there is nothing

to show

and so he swallows his heart

and says

_Nothing_.


	2. part 2

He forces himself to keep his eyes

away from his arm, tries

to convince himself that

it was

nothing

just a flash, a trick of the sun, something

explainable.

 

He finds a movie theater and drags

Dean with him (no looking);

they eat bad diner food

at a hole on the wall down the street (no

looking, there’s nothing there)

catch a baseball game on the fuzzy motel tv

(don’t look) and go

to bed exhausted from a day of

nothing

(lights off, I didn’t look)

 

The nightmares come fast and hard, full

of decay and dead things

_**ONE**_ , Sam in the middle of

an apple orchard, red sky roiling above him

Fruit rotted and blackened and crawling

with maggots and the maggots

abandon the fruit and slither under his skin, his

toenails and fingernails until they

wiggle out through his eyes and

his scream makes no sound;

_**TWO**_ , Dean beside him in the Impala laughing

at the teddy bear clutched in Sam’s arms—

they are young and Sam

is the only one who sees his father in

the front seat, half burnt,

telling them to quiet down now with his fire-eaten voice

and he turns and slaps Sam across the cheek

with his black skeleton fingers and

the skin of Sam’s cheek begins to smoke and

peel and rot and

his scream makes

no sound

_**THREE**_ , a graveyard in summer, hotter

than sin and Dean is

missing, or dead, he thinks, and he starts

to dig up the graves one after

another after another until the

blood from ripped blisters runs down to his elbows

and skin sloughs off in waves and

his hair is brittle and sparse

and his clothes hang ripped and tattered

on his rotted stinking frame and he realizes

that he is the dead one

and the screams of the dead ones make

no sound

 

— _Up, wake up, hey, Sammy_ —

he is jerking, falling and Dean’s hand catches him and

in the halflight halfdream his hand is a corpse hand

and this time Sam’s scream makes

a sound

and he smells the rot of his own body long

after the dream has faded.


	3. part 3

The day breaks quietly, with rain

and grey stale air, and Sam

stands, weary, dreamhaunted still,

and walks to the bathroom on tiptoe,

closing the door softly

so he doesn’t wake his brother.  
-

Three days, three nights, and the hallucinations

and dreams have not stopped.

It starts small, like the first flash

just a shimmer of something wrong, a trick

his eyes keep playing—

then, worse:

skin blackens and peels as he watches

from the corner of his eye, putrefaction in fast forward—

The fleshrot smell surrounds him, constant, like an

angry poisonous mist

until he starts wrapping his arms and feet

in gauze to keep himself

from retching.

-

The face in the bathroom mirror is hollowed and dabbed in sleepless purple bruising,

the mouth a twisted, tired slash;

Sam is not sure how much longer staying awake

will keep the nightmares at bay.

-

The sink is ancient and cracked

and creaks when he leans on it, the grimy film

of too many years sliding under the grip of his fingers,

the drain gurgling fetid water and old sludge.

He is wondering vaguely how old the building is

when a whisper comes twisting up through the muck

in the drain:

_n._

_e_

_t_

_s_

_i_

_L_

Sam tightens his grip around the edge of the basin,

breath ragged in his throat; long sweeping waves of cold, naked fear

shiver up his spine, all-consuming terror

like he hasn’t felt since the first time he learned

that monsters were real.

The smell is back, stronger than before,

nearly choking him—

(it calls up images of makeshift graves

on the edges of stagnant ponds,

heavy summer air trapping sweet half-rotted corpses

in the muddy banks

with the bones of long-dead fish)

He holds his breath and leans forward,

using his phone as a light

to illuminate the depths of the drain.

The voice drifts up again, sounding

like dead leaves:

 

_boy_

_to kill,_

_easy_

_ain’t so_

_Madness_

He listens, unable to even blink;

silence, and then

a wet, scratching sound, and

a blackened hand ( _what used to be a hand_ , he thinks wildly)

claws out of the drain,

snatching hold of Sam’s wrist with

lightning speed and thunderous strength,

covered in grime and decay—

his knife is in his other hand before he can think

and he _S L I C E S_ ,

dark blood spraying,

and the fingers release him, flopping lifelessly

into the sink’s sullied basin.

That is when he screams.

-

Dean bursts through the closed door within seconds,

hair sleep-mussed, a bed sheet

still hanging off one shoulder;

Sam points wordlessly at the sink and

wipes the grime from his wrist.

Dean looks in the sink,

then looks back at Sam, confused,

and there is a dead hand curling and rotted in the basin,

and there is the blood sticking and

drying on the porcelain,

and there is a piece of scabbed flash dangling

from Sam’s knife

and bruises forming on his wrist,

and Dean

doesn’t

see it.

-

and Sam starts to sob

and Dean holds him, asking quietly

_what’s wrong_

and it is all Sam can do to choke out,

_I don’t know_.


	4. part 4

It’s the work of a witch, of course,

and Dean snarls

at the taste of the word, like he always does

and Sam is just relieved

to have some kind of answer.  
-

They find her after calling Bobby,

and hearing about

all the other hunters gone mad

near this cluster of backwoods towns.

Narrowing down her location

is the easy part.

-

The night is dark ( _and full of terrors_ ,

Sam’s jittery mind finishes for him)

as he follows his brother’s flashlight, which doesn’t

seem to penetrate as deeply into the black

as it usually does

and Dean says nothing

of Sam’s (bandaged, rotting, _dying_ ) hand

resting, shaking, on his shoulder

and says nothing, again,

when Sam has to pause

and try not to gag on the smell

that only he can smell;

the taste of decay is

only heavy in Sam’s mouth, this time.

-

They find her gaunt and sunstarved,

surrounded by her symbols and her spells and half-prepared hex bags,

in the only unburnt corner of

a shell of a house,

long ago hollowed out and torn apart by flame.

(Sam feels a shiver go through Dean

as the dimming flashlight roams over the blackened wood

and the same shiver crawls down

Sam’s spine.)

-

When the light hits her,

her eyes do not leave her own hands,

which are weaving through the air

in patterns known

only to her, her mouth moving with

each stuttering jerk and graceful swoop,

the smile at the corner of her mouth

the only indications that she knows

she’s no longer alone.

-

_Why_ , comes tumbling out of Sam’s mouth before

he can stop it.

They halt together at the edge of

the childlike, sharpie-marked protective circle in which she sits.

_Because_ , she replies, and her hands drift to a stop

and drop lightly into her lap.

_Madness begets madness_ , she replies.

_I give what was given to me_ , she replies.

_One of you_. (She spits _you_ out like a piece of rotten apple.)

_One of you hunters caught me._

_I think Hell would have been more pleasant_

_than what he did to me_.

-

_Who_ , Dean shouts.

_Nameless, faceless_ , she replies.

Her hair has fallen out in patches, and what remains

lies in colorless strings around her shoulders.

Her brittle fingernails scratch

her bare shins, soft and constant.

_It doesn’t matter. He’s dead_.

Dean cocks his gun and aims, but Sam

shoves forward, pushing

at the barrier surrounding her.

_Make it stop_ , he snarls, shakes and shudders

ripping through him, violently—

_Just stop this_.

-

She smiles fully, then, and her teeth have

turned black, maggots crawling through the gaps

where a few have fallen out,

and she stands, meets him at the barrier,

so that their bodies are flush, almost touching.

_Madness ain’t so easy to kill, boy_ , she whispers,

and shoves him back with a flick of her fingers.


End file.
